My personal bugbear with Shotcut is that the “Fade Audio” filters are, frankly, unusable. They seem to be adjusting dB linearly, but since dB is an exponential unit rather than a linear one, the result is that the audio basically sounds like a sharp cut unless you fade across 10+ seconds, and even then it’s hard on the ears. I’ve seen enough responses from the dev on other posts about this to know it’s not going to be changed.
I’m aware of how to set up keyframes through Gain/Volume to basically back out a perceived linearity in the volume decrease, but doing this over and over for every audio fade I use is a pain in the ass. Is there a way to save a set of keyframes to a custom filter or something?
I suspect that the problem is not the linear/exponential issue as it is a dropoff issue.
A standard 1-sec audio fade-out is a 69 dB drop in 1 second, a 69 B/sec fade is basically a quick mute. It has the one advantage over a “Mute Button” that there is not the sense of “click” in the audio. (Which is why I use it routinely at the end of every audio clip.)
Even a 10 second fade-out is rather steep; it is ~7db/sec.
Yesterday I was editing a video using Keyframes on the Gain/Volume filter; it was quite difficult (not from Shotcut, but the acoustic decisions) to set a pleasant fade-out of a speaker’s voice.
I think next time, I will use 3 dB/sec as my starting point.
(That would be 23 seconds for a linear full-mute, but I think that after 7 seconds, at 21 dB down, I can begin increasing the dropoff rate.)